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Friday, April 13, 2012

Love story

Love has been expressed by humans through words, actions, time, and gifts. But what is this most mysterious, yet powerful thing we call love? We all supposedly understand it, yet we use cute metaphors and sayings to explain it. Why not be straight forward with our answer? Is it that we really don't understand it? Even our dictionary explains it as "an intense feeling of deep affection". I don't know about you, but that doesn't satisfy me. It is far too vague and broad to actually help me understand love intellectually and apart from my feelings. But can love even be understood this way, or is it to be forever felt but never thought?

Me and my girlfriend tell one another that we love each other and we hope this feeling to last. I would like to think that this feeling is genuine, but how can I really know without a solid intellectual understanding of what love is? I don't believe I can, hence the problem.

We can define love as the dictionary does, we can make up our own definition, we can even say it is merely a feeling one gets that cannot be described, or we can choose to not define it at all and bask in the joy and happiness it has brought humanity. However, it is not like me to merely cast aside an attempt to try and understand this mysterious abyss that philosophers have been trying to understand for years. With that, I now make my attempt.

I believe love to not be something of this world. An odd statement? To many people, yes. Someone is saying, "but love is part of this world. Whether we understand it or not, it is irrefutably a large part of the human race." My question is this: If it is such a large part of the human race, why can we not understand it? Can our mind understand everything but love and is hence inadequate to try and understand anything. If a source of knowledge is not all-knowing, than it knows nothing for sure. For example, I may see my water bottle as being blue, but do I know whether or not there is another way to see its true color apart from sight? No. Therefore, because my whole knowledge for the water bottle being blue comes from my empirical data, I cannot trust it. Empirical data is no source to be trusted because it is not all knowing. Since we cannot understand love, since we cannot think of love clearly, it must be either an alien to us, or we have become alien to it. The latter is my opinion.

This world was born of love, it lost love, it was saved by love, and it perseveres because of love. In the second stage of this, we lost touch with what exactly this thing called love is. In the third stage, we learned again that perhaps love was not dead forever and there was still hope to be found in a new source.  And in the fourth stage, two thousand years later, we have began to lose touch with it once more, but not all hope is lost. In fact, I know the end of the story....yeah, I looked. And by the way, to answer this complex question, "what is love?", that's an easy one, God is. And in the end, love wins.

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